Bonus Episode: When I was defeated. Why The Science Isn't Enough.

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] Oh, by the way, I failed at the most important job at the most important moment of my entire life. How will I ever make that right? This is The Man's School podcast Bonus Episode. Welcome to a Bonus Episode of the podcast. I wanna use this time to give you a little bit of my backstory on, on why I am doing this podcast and kind of how I think about it, because I think that it might give you some insight into the value that you can pull out of this. The conversations that I have with experts every week, I want this to be more than just an interesting podcast where you hear about experts that you might not run into. I want this to be something that you can learn from so that you can have better conversations with people, whether they're experts like this or just in general. And I think you'll be able to pull more out of the podcast if you understand where I come from and, and why I care about expertise so much, and the ability to really question expertise. So when I grew up, I had no idea what I wanted to be. You know, a lot of people know that they wanted to be an engineer or a fireman, or a scientist or a doctor. I didn't have any of that. I grew up as the middle child of seven. And so I got very good at being able to plead my case in a short amount of time, which really is the ability to take complicated ideas and make them simple to understand and help people to want to agree with them.

Vance Crowe [00:01:34] So I grew up just kind of honing that skill, and when it came time for me to go to school, I didn't know what I wanted to be, but I figured I should probably do something in communications. And so I went to Marquette University studying communications, and my education was great. That was a really interesting, a Jesuit education requires you to study philosophy and theology. I learned all about logic and statistics, and you know, I had a really well-rounded education. My communications classes were good. I learned about small group communications and some of the theories, but when I got done with school, I still didn't really know what I wanted to be. And so when I got done, I kind of left with the philosophy that I just want to go do good in the world, but I didn't have a real clear vision for what that would be. And so I ended up leaving and, and I did a bunch of jobs, really interesting, fascinating jobs. I I ran a camp for inner city kids. I was a deckhand on an ecotourism ship. I bought a house and renovated it and sold it. Got to pay off some of my student loans. And then I joined the US Peace Corps. And one of the things that you'll notice about the different jobs that I had leading up to the Peace Corps, it might have one dimension of something that I wanted. I wanted to travel, I wanted to be helping people. I wanted to be, you know, know building something that would last. But none of those jobs held up.

Vance Crowe [00:03:04] They didn't, they didn't, they didn't do that for me, and I didn't really think that the Peace Corps would either. But I joined the Peace Corps because I thought, I wanna know if I could survive living in a different culture. When I had been a decade, I'd gotten to travel into a all these different cultures, and when I was building this house, I got to learn new skills. But I wondered, can you take this somewhere else? Drop me in the middle of nowhere and see if I can not just survive, but thrive. And so I joined the US Peace Corps and they ended up sending me to Kenya. And there I was stationed in a small village on the side of a mountain that had recently started having really terrible challenges with malaria. Children were dying there. And when you get malaria as an infant three years old, it, it can cause either permanent brain damage or death. And if you get it before you're six, you can have, you know, different injuries that will follow you around for the rest of your life. And so when I discovered that I would be working on this project, that I would be trying to help them figure out how to prevent malaria, that was the most purpose I'd ever had in my entire life. That was the opportunity that I saw that was clearly inherently good and was pointed in the right direction. You know, all these other jobs I had done had been good. They'd been productive, but this one was going to allow me to make a positive difference in the world.

Vance Crowe [00:04:37] And I jumped in with both feet. And even though I was in a strange place that spoke a totally different language than I, than my mother tongue, and you know, I didn't understand the culture very well, there I was every day teaching them that it is the a female analis mosquito that comes out between the hours of 11:00 PM and 3:00 AM And if you can just dump a little bit of vegetable oil every time there are puddles that form from the rains, or use your bed net, but make sure you apply the, the chemicals on it to make it effective just in such a way. Or if you can cover your children at night, even though it's hot out, you get them to wear long sleeves, you can prevent them from getting malaria. And when I taught these lessons, as difficult as it was to communicate, as hard as it was to gather up the courage to go stand in front of a bunch of people, I didn't know I loved this work. Because if I could convince any person to change what they were doing, the odds that their child would get malaria and die or be permanently harmed by it would go down. And so I jumped in with both feet, and I was working so hard on this every day until one day a man came walking into town and the man was wearing a crisp, clean suit, which it's not uncommon for men in East Africa to wear a suit when they travel, but this suit was particularly well pressed and very clean for having just traveled up the very long path to get to this village.

Vance Crowe [00:06:13] And the man was carrying with him a, a box, and he walked straight into the center of town, the place that I usually taught my lessons about how to prevent malaria. And he set it down and he stepped up on the box. And without missing a beat, he says, my brothers and sisters bow your heads and pray. And so everybody did. This is a devout community. So they put their heads down and he goes through a prayer, and as soon as he is done, he doesn't miss a beat. He goes straight into his spiel and he says, my brothers and sisters, I am here because I have heard a great tragedy, has befall you. It is a tragedy that I personally understand. And so he has everyone's attention, right? Somebody stands up and says, I, I know that you're facing a tragedy and I'm here to help. You know, you, you, you stop, you listen. And so he says, my wife and my daughter were killed by the scourge of malaria. And when that happened to me, my brothers and sisters, I lost everything. I, I, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I sold my house and I sold my farm, and I went wandering the countryside looking for what it was that could have saved them. And after passing over mountains and going through rivers and traveling for weeks upon weeks, I came across a man by a brook. This man was a monk. And he looked deep into my eyes and he saw how much pain I was in.

Vance Crowe [00:07:45] And so he gave me water from that brook water that I have right here. And in front of all these people, he reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a little vial of water, and he says, my brothers and sisters, if I had only had this little vial of water, then I could have poured it into my wash basin, and my wife and my daughter could have washed themselves with that water. And if they had d done that they would be here today, which is why I am here to speak with you, because for 500 Kenyan shillings, you can have this vial of water that will protect you and your family. I was standing off to the side of him, you know, I must have stuck out like a sore thumb because he walked into the only town in the area with a white and zung gu and an American, that, that, that he had no idea what what I would be doing there. But he did his spiel anyway. So I'm standing there watching everything that he's doing, and I had a great big smirk on my face, the kind of smirk that only, you know, early twenties year old guy could have that traveled all the way to Africa thinking he could just go stamp out this problem by himself. But I had that smile, that smirk wiped off my face because every single person gathered around that man found a way to give him 500 Kenyan shillings.

Vance Crowe [00:09:30] 500 Kenyan shillings is the equivalent of more than a full day's work of backbreaking labor in the Sub-Saharan sun of Kenya. These people are living without electricity or running water. They, you know, I was there taking bucket baths. You know, they do not have 500 Kenyan shillings to just throw around. And so I'm sitting there thinking, what should I do? Should I go knock him off of his box? Should I jump in between him and the people trying to hand him their money to give him them water? But I didn't do anything at all. And I watched that man take all of their money and then pick up his box and walk outta town. And it was in that moment that I knew for certain that the science is not enough. That there are men and women that will come and stand on boxes. And if they have a more compelling story than you do, it does not matter if you have the evidence. It doesn't matter if you know what the correct answer is, or at least the better answer, it doesn't matter because their story will outcompete yours and people will buy their snake oil. So my whole life was changed there. And, and sadly, and I've told this story hundreds of times before, but I ended up getting really, really sick early.

Vance Crowe [00:11:08] I didn't, I didn't stay for my whole tour. I was, I was gone very early. And that was because I had developed a terrible allergy covered from head to toe and, and looked like, you know, I'm a good Midwestern kid and I'm hyperallergic to poison ivy. And that is essentially what I had all over my body. And what I didn't realize when I was there was that the, the poison Vy plant branch family is the same on, on the same branch as mangoes. And so some people are hyperallergic to mangoes in the same way that you would be to poison ivy. It's actually the oil in the skin of a mango. And, but I didn't know this. And so the whole time I'm broken out to head to toe, I'm sitting there thinking, thank God I've got all these mangoes around me to eat, because this allergy would be terrible if I couldn't sit here and eat more mangoes, right? So I was dosing myself with the worst poison ivy that you can imagine. And I ended up having to come home early. I didn't know it at the time. It wasn't until years later that I found that out. And you can imagine, as I'm flying back on that plane, thinking about that man on the box, thinking about not being able to go and out compete him, and thinking that that village was left not with a scientific story, that they could understand something that would help them actually prevent their malaria, covering up their children, smothering the, the mosquito larvae and the puddles using that vegetable oil.

Vance Crowe [00:12:44] They didn't remember those things. They bought the snake oil and they would probably buy it again. And so I thought the one purpose that I had in life, the one thing that I knew that I was doing that was unequivocally good and could make a difference in the world, well, I thought that I was leaving it behind. And so when I came back to the United States, it took me a little while to wake up. It took me a little while to figure out, you know, what am I gonna do now? And where am I gonna be and how am I going to apply my skills? And oh, by the way, I failed at the most important job, at the most important moment of my entire life. How will I ever make that right? But as I started to wake up, I started to look around and I realized, Hey, wait a second. It's not just in these tiny villages where they don't have electricity or running water or concrete floors. It's not just there that men and women come and stand on boxes. It's everywhere where the information is complex. Anywhere where you have to use science to be able to explain to people how things work, what decision they ought to make. They are in hyper competition with men and women that will come and stand on boxes and sell snake oil. And suddenly I realized that the job that I thought that I had that was so important over in Africa, could now be directly applied to my life here.

Vance Crowe [00:14:19] And so, some other time we can talk about the different jobs that I had. After that, I, I ended up moving to Northern California and working in community public radio. I, I went to the, to graduate school just outside of New York City and studied diplomacy and negotiations. I went on to work at the World Bank, I started my own company. I ended up spending some time working at Monsanto. And all of these things have been directed around helping people figure out how to explain their expertise, how to open it up so that other people can understand what is the right answer, and how do we know that that's the right answer? What evidence do we have that that's the way we should think about things? And so when I invite guests on, I want them to be interesting. I, I want it to be a good conversation that you feel like you're just sitting right there, that you're close enough that you could ask a question yourself. But I also am trying to dig deeper and to figure out are they the expert that, that they appear to be? What do they know? What, what information do they have access to that we should know about? How should we think about the things that they have studied deeply? What can we take away from the years, from the decades of discipline that they've had to apply to their life in order to understand these things so deeply? What can we take away from it? But the biggest thing that I want to communicate is how to do this, because you are going to encounter people that may be an expert.

Vance Crowe [00:16:00] They may know something that most other people don't know. They may have answers that we don't have, or they may be selling snake oil. They may not actually have some deep knowledge. They may just have a good story. And what I want you to be able to do is to be able to probe that, to really learn how to listen and to hear what they're saying and ask better questions. And so that's, that's my goal. I want to do this because I wanna learn, but I also want to teach. And I'm so glad that you've been along for the ride. You know, I've now published 17 episodes. I'm proud of all of them. Each time I try and get better, I try and make this sound better. But I hope that you are taking things away, that you're applying to your regular life more than just the facts that you learn from the experts. The other day, I wrote down that I wanna start being more deliberate about explaining how to improve your communication skills. So from time to time, I'm gonna jump on and I'm gonna do a Bonus Episode. And I'm gonna tell a story about an experience that I had and how it taught me to do something. And I want you to listen to those so that you can be, become a better communicator, so that you can become more persuasive. So you can make a person understand that you are listening to what they're saying. You do understand what they're saying. And, and I'm gonna do that because this is my passion.

Vance Crowe [00:17:33] And if you've hung with me through any number of these 17 episodes, you might be open to hearing and learning and listening and thinking about these ideas. And if you do and you'll like them, I I hope that you'll tell your friends about it. I hope that you will communicate with me on Twitter. Say, hi, check in. Tell me what you liked, what you didn't like. Give me ideas for other guests. Tell me where I fell short and how I could do better. I really want to push this thing forward because that's what I'm doing now. You know, I left Monsano and Bayer to restart my own company sometime. You've probably heard me tell in, in other places about why I left Monsanto. I can tell it again here sometime if you want, but for now, it should. Just suffice to say, I'm traveling around the country and I'm trying to teach people how to be way better communicators, not just a little bit better, not just, you know, aspirationally better. I mean, tangibly literally better. And I'm gonna try and go to places that are, that people are working on things that I think are important. And right now that's agriculture. It's been a little bit of banking, but it could be anybody. And if, if you are interested in learning more about it, just check out my website, Vance Crowe dot com. And, but otherwise, if you just like the podcast, that's enough. You know, if you don't have a, a speaking engagement that you can think of that, that I'd be a good fit for, fine, just hang out. Just, just keep listening and engage.

Vance Crowe [00:19:04] And if you want, I'm gonna try and start doing more community building things on the Vance Crow Podcast Facebook page. I think I'm gonna start lowering the number of places I post this. And I'm gonna really hone in on just a couple. I like Twitter 'cause I like where I communicate, just unfiltered. I'm gonna definitely do the, the interviews on both YouTube and the podcast. And I think I'm gonna try and carry on conversations on Facebook. So I, I hope you'll join over there. And I'm probably gonna leave a lot of the other ones behind. I think I'm spread a little bit too thin, and I wanna focus my efforts on the places where I want to be and where, where you are. And that's where I'm getting the most interactions. So I'm gonna sign off for here. And this is, thank you for staying all the way around it. It has been a true pleasure to, to do these podcasts. I I plan to continue to release an interview every Wednesday, and we'll see about these bonus episodes. This took me a while to sit down and really hone what I was thinking about, but, but I liked it and I, I hope that you like it, and I hope you'll let me know. So thanks so much for listening and, and we'll see you on Wednesdays and occasionally on a Bonus Episode.